The methodology of this report is lousy because they ask people to rank their happiness on a 1-10 scale. The problem is that people from different cultures interpret the scale very differently. The most "instinctive" way to interpret it is to "start" at 1, and increment your rating the happier you are. So if you're not happy at all, you stop at 1. If you're a little bit happy, you give yourself a 2. If you're very happy, you might go up to a 7 or 8. If you're the happiest person in the world, you'll go up all the way to 10. This "start-at-1" interpretation is common in undeveloped countries because it's natural.

But in developed countries, people interpret it the opposite way. That's because developed countries have a lot of schooling, and most people's encounters with numeric ratings are with report cards. So instead of 6/10 meaning "pretty good", as it would naturally, it now means a C-, which is pretty lousy. Likewise, a 10/10 doesn't mean "over the moon", it just means "no mistakes". In fact, you can see this on Manifold: people give a 5 star review by default, and if they give less than that it means there was something they were disappointed by.

So the World Happiness Report ends up being more of a measure of how educated a country is, not how happy it is. That's why countries like Finland and Iceland top the rankings despite having the highest antidepressant usage in the world. And that's why South Korea is in the top half of the rankings, despite being the second most suicidal country in the world.

If they knew what they were doing, they would make the survey question a binary "Are you happy with your life? Yes/No". That would minimize the variation in interpretation.

It's also possible that the researchers do know what they're doing, but they're ok with it because the results of the survey match their biases.

/end rant

@ItsMe
Wikipedia says it's a scale from 0 to 10 (thus mid-point is 5,0), rating one's own current state, the "best possible life" = 10, and the "worst possible life" = 0.

This is indeed hardly meaningful, because the depths of suffering are practically infinite. It just suggests that, in aggregate, Afghans can't imagine their own life being any worse, and Finns can't imagine theirs being any less bad. In any case it's more like a global measure of the lack of imagination.
The Finns were universally very surprised about these results, as was I.

In Finland, you now have:

• 10% unemployment (2nd in EU)

• 1.5% trade deficit to GDP

• 4.5% budget deficit to GDP

• 89% debt to GDP
  (if they wanted to join the eurozone now, they wouldn't be allowed to)

• 0.2% GDP growth

• 17% poverty rate (2023, probably higher now)

• 25.5% VAT (1st in eurozone)

Either a lack of money doesn't buy unhappiness, or there's something very weird going on here.

The mainstream mass media definitely also portrait to the Nordics that elsewhere it's hell, namely way worse, that stretches out the imaginable scale.

The key point is that you interpreted the midpoint to be 5. That's not how everyone thinks about it. I remember reading in Humble Pi by Matt Parker that people instinctively think of numbers on a logarithmic scale, but school trains them to view them linearly. He mentioned a study on people from an indigenous Amazon tribe who were asked to pick the middle number between 1 and 10, and they actually picked three!